Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."

Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.

Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work--Rice calls it "a study in pain." Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)

Rice's research gives fresh blood to her storytelling. Even her chronic third-act problem scarcely slows down this brisk romp of a novel. Pandora has intellectual thirst as well as blood lust, and she conveys the high old time Rice obviously had imbibing historical lore. "It is fun to read these mad Gnostics!" exults Pandora in the early Christian era. It is also fun to read this mad Pandora. Anne Rice hasn't been this fun to read in years.

From Library Journal

In Queen of the Damned (LJ 10/1/88), the third volume of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles," readers were introduced to the psychologically wounded immortal Pandora, who roused herself long enough to rescue her lover, Marius. In this first novel of a new series, Pandora tells fledgling vampire David Talbot the story of her mortal life as a woman of privilege in the Rome of Augustus Caesar. When Tiberius ascends the throne, most of Pandora's family is murdered, but she manages to escape to the city of Antioch. There her interest in the cult of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis is reawakend. At the same time, Pandora suffers from nightmares of blood drinking and torture. Also in Antioch is Marius, a recent initiate into the world of the vampire. He knows that Pandora is being led to this same terrible fate, which he desperately wants to prevent. Throughout, Rice interjects tantalizing bits of the vampiric history and horrors that pervade her earlier books. Although Pandora's story has enough substance to be read and enjoyed on its own, those already familiar with the Chronicles will find added insight to the characters of Pandora and Marius. For all fiction collections.

-?Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Bowie, MD

Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Readers would be hard-pressed to understand Rice's enormous popularity if they were to read only Memnoch the Devil (1995), Servant of the Bones (1996), and Violin (1997), her last three abysmal novels, but finally, thankfully, the Queen of the Blood Drinkers has returned to the source of her best work, her sexy and invincible vampires. This is the first in a projected series, New Tales of the Vampires, and that old Rice magic is back. Her characters are seductive, the settings romantic, the pace fast and furious, and the esoteric mumbo-jumbo suitably mystifying as she picks up the saga of Lestat in Paris, where a handsome and debonair fledgling vampire named David Talbot comes upon an ancient one busy sucking the life out of a young woman contemplating suicide along the Seine. He approaches Pandora, a porcelain-skinned, topaz-eyed beauty, and charms her into writing down the story of her remarkable 2,000-year life, from her mortal years as the only daughter of a wealthy Roman senator circa 15 B.C., to her exile in Antioch, initiation into the worship of the great goddess Isis, and vampiric love affair with the golden-haired Marius. Pandora is a superheroine: beautiful, of course, but also smart, fearless, independent, lusty, and resourceful, and so pumped up at the end of her breathless narrative, she takes off for New Orleans, hot on the trail of Lestat and Marius, suggesting that Talbot (and Rice fans) stay tuned for the next installment. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews

0-375-70218-0 First sheaf in a new series by Rice, picking up where The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) left off and telling of 2,000-year-old Pandora, who is seduced in Paris by newly-fanged David Talbot, an elderly scholar, into writing her memoirs. Followers of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain vampire historicals will find themselves on familiar ground in Rice's Rome of Caesar Augustus. Remember that the stronger half of Rice's recent Servant of the Bones (1996), about the Wandering Babylonian Ghost Azriel, gave her purple pen free rein in limning the hanging garden, golden passageways, and other ornaments of Babylon. Similarly now, as she turns from modern Paris to ancient Rome, her writing lifts from gruelingly sloppy hackwork to tightly engaging prose, perhaps because this material marries research to make-believe: Give her some ground to stand on, and she tells a good story. Here, Pandora is 10, Marius 25--and not yet a vampire--when the two first meet in her father's palazzo. Twenty years and a pair failed marriages later, when her father is attacked by Augustus and she must flee to Antioch, Pandora finds herself overcome by dreams of bloodlust. She asks a priestess in Antioch: Do these blood dreams come from the goddess Isis? Then she meets Marius, whom she's adored from girlhood on, in the temple of Isis and goes to live with him. But Marius is now the caretaker of two living mummies or statues that Pandora mistakes for Isis and Osiris (or Horus), and Isis/Akasha bestows on her the dark gift in the novel's most ecstatic scene. Marius exhorts her, though, about her detestation of blood-drinkers and swears never to make another (which requires exchange of blood with the host). Forever fighting, the rational Marius and emotional Pandora care for the evil gods for two centuries, through the spread of Christianity, and then part, with a sequel (Armand) promised. Forget Violin (1997). This is Rice in top romantic form, despite a slippery page here and there. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"This is Rice in top romantic form."

--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"SEDUCTIVE . . . [RICE] HAS RETURNED TO THE SOURCE OF HER BEST WORK, her sexy and invincible vampires. . . . Pandora is a superheroine: beautiful, of course, but also smart, fearless, independent, lusty, resourceful, and so pumped up at the end of her breathless narrative, she takes off for New Orleans, hot on the trail of Lestat and Marius."

--Booklist

"EERILY VIBRANT . . . The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris café in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook. . . . A wealth of narrative twists and period detail."

--The New York Times Book Review

"RICE'S MOST BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN WORK . . . A BOOK THAT CELEBRATES THE WONDER OF THE WORLD ON EVERY PAGE."

--Raleigh News & Observer

"TANTALIZING."

--Library Journal

From the Paperback edition.